This year's Ash Wednesday and Chinese New Year are a day apart. And so, as I had accepted a Binondo Tour for students of Assumption College, I expected a day of merriment and confusion as residents of the area were in the thick of preparations for the beginning of Lent and a rousing start to the Chinese Lunar year of the wooden goat.
My dear friend, Anne Vera now teaches Cross Cultural Communications at the Assumption in San Lorenzo Village, Makati. I gladly accepted the tour assignment since it would mean the opportunity to be right in the center of all the action on an ash Wednesday and the eve of chinese New Year.
There were four Mabuhay Guides on the first day of the tour (this was a Tuesday): Lovely Reynoso, Jeff Velasco, Ronnie Gador and myself. The next day's tour had Yael fernandez, Ronnie Gador and myself leading the students divided into three groups.
We did our usual Binondo route with the girls in tow and we enjoyed the company of Anne's students. They were all willing to learn and intently listened to commentaries of the Mabuhay Guides along the way. Such well-behaved girls! Naturally, our commentaries centered on the mixed influences of the Filipinos, Filipino-Chinese in the area. After all, Binondo is a microcosm of the mixture of culture, traditions, norms, mores, economy, architecture, and religion of the common tao living within its 66.11 hectare boundary.
By noon (on both days), everyone had converged at President's for a sumptuous lunch that had the girls and the guides eating their fill... and then for some last minute shopping for fried siopao and more boxes of Tikoy... We jostled our way in and out of the thickening crowd that ignored the heat and humidity of the busy Binondo streets. Some of the students even got media exposure from the networks covering the festivities... Now, that's priceless!
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